Imrainai figures that, as in all stories, there are many many many things that happened before it was time for the main action of this one to begin. Probably Parael learned something; ancestors know who she learned it from. What Imrainai knows, though, is that Parael finds her in the main work crew living quarters one day, at the tail end of a story. She has a favor to ask. Before Imrainai can ask what it is, Parael has presented her with a piece of paper. At first she thinks it's the stuff they have on Earth, but no, it's a surface made from lots of tiny medication slips glued together.

She also has a pen. A real one, not a piece of plastic with printer toner on it.

"I need a circle with some words inside. I would draw it but I can't actually see. And the material's fragile, I don't want to tear it."

She doesn't know what this is for and kind of wants to get Mathrael to see if it's OK - nobody on this ship has said they can't have paper, but it's best not to do anything that might later be counted as troublemaking. Mathrael is on a shift right now, though, and Parael seems very serious about this.

She painstakingly writes out the words I summon a demon, in Confederate One, over the course of a couple minutes. Some of the children cluster around her to stare. She draws a circle around her words.

"I'm not sure what in particular you're talking about. - How's 'Earthling'?" he asks, dropping the pretentious scientific term in favor of slapping an Etra La suffix on its name for the planet they're approaching.

"I'm extrapolating, I suppose it's possible that in this universe Earth is actually a soundstage someone rigged up on which to film hoax movies, but it looks like I expect it to look and has humans who speak languages I know and such."

"Hm. I guess maybe it's a layered world thing, like when people go to the the realm of the dead or the plane of shadows or something, and they're in the same place but on a different level of it. But, like, also with time travel. I guess."

" - well they're not real? But time travel and summoning indestructible Li- humans who can magically make planes out of thin air are not really supposed to be real things either, so I feel like I'm not super confident in my assessment of which lies connect to reality in which ways right now."

"You could call me a demon," he says. "Anyway, yes, I seem to be from an alternate universe and I don't know exactly how much I can assume holds based on what I know from there beyond the things that obviously don't, but 'humans evolved on Earth' definitely seems like one of the safer guesses."

"Wow, okay. So if we assume a generation length of twenty years, that'd be..." He does some fiddling on his computer. "Thirty-five hundred generations ago. Going up the maternal line, your thirty-five-hundred-generations-ago grandma was thus -" He conjures a tiny model of her in her surroundings, plasticized so as not to have the floppy horrible quality of miniature humans.

"How do I -? Oh, uh, I can make things based on my imagination, but most of the time I'm copying from something that actually existed; I just have to have in mind whatever it is I want to copy and then the magic takes care of making an accurate replica. In this case I have replaced all the water in this ancestor of yours with plastic because if you don't do that you get sorta creepy dead mini humans, but other than that the copy should be accurate to what I was aiming at."

"Huh." Back to staring at the tiny human. "I don't think that proves that we evolved on Earth, even accepting all of those premises, but it's not what I'd expect the earliest Li - humans? The earliest humans to look like. So that's something."